


opportunities for eternity

by jdphoenix



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Urban Fantasy, F/M, Season/Series 02, Vampire Ward
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-20
Updated: 2017-01-20
Packaged: 2018-09-18 19:23:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,156
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9399299
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jdphoenix/pseuds/jdphoenix
Summary: Skye's been kidnapped, and there's one rock the team hasn't considered turning over for answers. Jemma does.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Definitely read the tags up there if you haven't already. This was written for the anon prompt "more than one kiss."

Jemma should be working. The others are. Fitz and Bobbi and Mack are all bustling about the lab. Even Hunter is helping by fetching and carrying and providing coffee whenever anyone asks. But Jemma can’t seem to tear her attention from the singed braid of fabrics dangling from her hand.

It’s a charm. Or it was. Outwardly it looks precisely like those all the rest of them wear. But of course theirs were all made by mothers and fathers, infused with the protection of hopeful love with a blood bond to bind it. Skye’s wasn’t that at all. It was a charm of Jemma’s own making, something new to give her the same protection they all had in the field. (She still remembers how tightly Skye held her when she threw her arms around her in thanks.)

It was never the same as a mother’s charm, but it was … well, it was something. Though not enough, it seems.

She closes her eyes and can see, just as though it were happening right in front of her all over again, the moment Skye disappeared. The lightning, the nightmarish figure looming up behind her, the way Skye paled when he bent to whisper in her ear.

“He knew her real name,” she says softly.

Hunter, in the process of hunting down precisely the wrench Mack needs, is near enough to hear. “Yeah,” he says, even more quietly than she did. He puts his hand over hers, hiding the remains of her charm, the only bit of Skye that was left when that monster took her, from her sight. “But the only way you could’ve guarded against someone like that is if you knew it too. This isn’t your fault.”

May said the same on the flight back to the Playground. Coulson said it again once they arrived. And Fitz said it at least three times while May and Jemma filled the others in on precisely what happened out there.

She curls her fingers beneath Hunter’s, holding the ruined charm tight. “The last time she took it off, it was for an undercover mission.” Skye claimed the childish charm didn’t fit with her undercover persona - a young woman with her boyfriend in tow, setting off for her first big adventure - and Jemma can still remember so clearly the smell of blood staining those marble tiles, the incense clouding the air, Ian Quinn’s hateful chanting. He chained her to an altar and cut her open, all to divine answers from on high. “She died.”

What Hunter might have to say to _that_ \- if he could manage anything at all - is preempted when Mack yells for him. He curses, grabs entirely the wrong wrench, and says, “Hold that thought.”

Jemma would love to wait, to continue sitting impotently and allow Hunter to make her feel better with empty words and pretty lies, but Skye needs help. Jemma won’t be letting history repeat itself.

She slips from her stool and, somewhat ungainly on her feet seeing as her bum’s gone to sleep, hurries from the lab. Along the way, she snatches up the silver knife Bobbi used to cut the scorpion grass for her scrying.

Determination and fear of something worse than what’s ahead see her all the way down into the dungeon beneath the base. (Koenig calls it Vault D to make it more appealing, but they all know what it really is.) The computerized lock and the wards on the door both grant her access and then she’s shut up inside the eerily still room.

It’s not as though there were any agents milling about outside making noise, but somehow the quiet seems so much _more_ in here. Perhaps that’s because while there was no one outside, there is someone here.

Each stone step she takes down leaves her colder than the last. The temperature must drop ten degrees in the fifteen feet from the door to the concrete floor. And there, for the first time, Jemma hesitates. There are only two defenses remaining between her and the monster curled up against the far wall and, in order to speak with him, she’ll need to cross them both.

Coulson could do it and still have a line of defense between them. So could May or Fitz or even Skye herself. But Jemma will have none at all.

The reminder of why - of what sets her apart from the rest of them in this regard and the guilt of it - spurs her forward.

Moist earth squelches beneath her feet. There’s grass coming in courtesy of the artificial sunlight and the smell of it as her footfalls crush it reminds her of summer. It’s hallowed ground she crosses…

…And a demon’s pit she steps into. Here, in the ten foot diameter half-circle of space granted him, lays Ward. She’s close enough to him now that even the collar chaining him to the wall wouldn’t stop him grabbing her, but his own body does. She wonders, not for the first time, what it must be like for him. Does he dream while his body decays around him? Or is he aware of every agonizing second as his flesh rots and wrinkles, leaving him in a dry, lifeless husk? Does he know she’s here? Or does he think she’s a hallucination?

There will be opportunity to ask him soon enough.

She brings the knife up to the inside of her elbow and cuts a shallow line, holding it so that the blood pools in the hollow of her arm before dripping slowly to the stone floor. It hurts, to be sure, but she’s had worse than this and thoughts of what Skye must be enduring even now halt any whining she might be tempted to do, even in the privacy of her own mind.

Ward remains still for long seconds until, just when she thinks she might have to come nearer to feed him where he is, she sees his hand move. It slips slowly down to press flat against the floor, giving him support as he heaves his entire body up. She doesn’t know if the creaking of joints and the crackling of dried skin are her imagination, but the predatory look in his eyes when they finally lift to meet hers is certainly real.

The chain rattles as he stumbles forward and then it’s all she can do to keep her footing as he falls on her. His shoulder presses painfully into her collarbone and his hand is so tight around her wrist, holding her arm to his mouth, that she knows a fleeting fear he might break it. But it is only fleeting because he’s drinking her in, drawing out her very life from her veins, and it’s been _months_.

Before Ward, she always thought the stories about vampiric blood drawing being sensual were poppycock, the result of fanciful fictions created by fools who’d never faced a vampire before. Jemma had. Not in the field, but in the lab, where every precaution was taken to ensure the safety of the researchers. It was horrific, nothing but a beast in the shape of a man and all the more monstrous for it. She couldn’t understand how anyone faced with such a creature would consider it attractive in the least.

Now she knows. Each pull he takes seems to tug at her every vein and artery. She can feel it throughout her body, to her deepest core. And when he paired it with actual sex, emptying her out and filling her up all at once … there was nothing better.

There still isn’t.

He stops. Before she’s even come back to herself well enough to realize she should be stopping him. There’s surely something to that but she refuses to think on it long enough to discover what it is - or, for that matter, how her hand has come to be curled beneath the heavy collar, around the base of his skull.

He’s looking more himself now. A little gaunt perhaps and paler than ever, but not at all the corpse that’s been littering the floor of the dungeon for weeks now. He pins her with eyes turned dark by bloodlust. His expression asks his question for him.

She mentally straightens herself up; she came down here for a reason and it wasn’t to get Ward back on his feet.

“Who knows Skye’s real name?”

He pulls even farther away, forcing her hand to slip from his neck. She presses it to her arm. His wide eyes snap to it the moment she presses down, but return to her face immediately.

“Why?” he asks.

“She’s been kidnapped,” she says, figuring there’s no point hiding it from him, not when he could easily force the information from her, “by someone who knew her name. You keep talking about her parents, could they have enemies? Someone who might have found their daughter’s name?”

The collar tips to one side as Ward shrugs a shoulder. “Everyone has enemies.” He returns to the wall. It’s barely five feet but he takes them slowly, like an old man afraid of losing his footing.

She firms her lips into a line, holding back the brunt of her annoyance. “Yes, but do you know of anyone in particular who could do this?”

He slides down the wall to sit on the floor. His eyes are more human now and if it weren’t for their current location, it would seem, from his expression, they’re having nothing more than a friendly conversation.

“You came back to me,” he says, putting an emphasis she doesn’t like in the least on the words, “put yourself in danger, gave me your blood, for this? To bargain for a name that might, if you are very lucky, lead you to Skye?”

“She’s missing.” Jemma thinks again of the man who took her, his awesome power and eyeless face that seemed to see far more than any rightly formed man would have a right to. She imagines she can feel the ruined charm in her pocket, that it’s somehow still warm from the power that burned it up and took Skye from them. “I have to find her,” she says weakly.

Ward looks her over from head to toe and back again, lingering each time on her bloody arm. “Did you finally tell him?”

The question throws her off balance. “Who?” And, for that matter, “What?”

His mouth tips up on one side, sharp enough to cut glass. “Coulson. About us.”

Her gut churns and she pulls her injured arm in to her chest without meaning to.

“I figured that was why the blood bags stopped coming. He found out you’d been mine.”

Before Ward she thought vampires were nothing but twisted monsters, the result of some ancient necromancer’s foolish incantation turned into a plague on the Earth. But then a plague of a different sort nearly killed her and Ward, in saving her, risked his own life and stranded himself far from his blood supply. He trusted her with his secret and she, starry eyed from her own near-death and his heroics both, promised to keep it while agreeing to help.

It was only reasonable, after that, to provide him with a steady supply of fresh blood - better for him and thus better for their team as it would keep him in peak fighting shape - rather than let him continue to pilfer blood from the Bus’s stores. And, she can admit now, she did enjoy his needing her. Even more than the feeding.

“No,” she says. “I’m afraid he simply grew tired of the sound of your voice.”

Ward chuckles.

Coulson will know though. She won’t be able to hide this visit from him. He’ll be furious with her. Crossing the hallowed ground, allowing Ward to drink from her, and when he finds out it wasn’t the first time, that she’s been lying to him all these months… She mentally pushes away the phantom image of Coulson’s disappointed face, gripping her arm until tears burn at her eyes.

She has to find Skye. If Ward won’t give her a name then she’ll have nothing to offer Coulson after she shatters his faith in her.

“There has to be someone. Ward, please. You _love_ Skye.” Her voice cracks because it’s disgusting. If he’s a monster pretending at human emotion, it’s an insult to her entire race. If he truly believes he loves her, it’s just pathetic.

His head lolls back against the wall. He didn’t drink much and after weeks with nothing at all, the burst of energy the promise of blood gave him is fading fast. Soon she doubts he’ll be able to move at all. “If I had to put money on it…” His eyes slide away from her, to the shadows at the base of the stairs.

“Yes?” she prods, stepping closer.. “Who?” Any lead is better than none.

He focuses on her. “Let her go. You can’t save her from this.”

Fury, worse than she felt when he proved himself just as despicable as every other one of his kind, surges within her. “No!” she yells, stepping closer. “That’s not good enough! I’m not giving up on her! Tell me!”

His eyes darken and she longs suddenly for the grass beneath her feet and the safety of the hallowed ground, but she’s standing over him, too close to retreat. It would be nothing at all for him to snap her neck, even in the state he’s in.

“I could make you,” he says, and though his voice is soft, there’s a thread of warning that freezes her to her core. “Your blood’s been singing in my veins for more than a year now. And you made sure that-” he nods to the charm, older and more frayed than Skye’s was this morning, but still potent as ever- “couldn’t protect you from me. Jemma.”

“How _dare_ you-” She gave him her name in confidence, when she trusted him, believed in him, cared for him.

“I could tell you to turn around, walk up those stairs, and never even think Skye’s name again. Because it’s. Not. Worth it.”

She’s shaking. From fear or his use of her most secret name or both, she couldn’t say. But still she manages a firm, “It’s Skye.”

He considers that for a moment, holding her in place with his stare. She’s towering over him, but he has all the power here and they both know it. Slowly he reaches up to take her numb hand. He uses it to pull her down to a crouch between his legs and then sets to cleaning the blood off her skin.

His tongue sweeps over her palm, between her fingers, up her wrist, all the way to her elbow in lingering, sucking strokes. From time to time the flats of his teeth just touch her skin and she thinks he does it on purpose, a reminder that she’s walked willingly into the monster’s arms and that she isn’t fighting to be free. If anything, she’s fighting to hold back a pathetic moan.

He sighs something that might be _I’ve missed you_ as he peels her hand away from her elbow, but she must hear it wrong because for months all he asked for was Skye. Or perhaps she only understands it wrong; she was always doing that on the Bus, misreading him because she had misconstrued the relationship between them. To him, she was nothing but a heart to drink and a body to fuck.

As if to prove her right, once he’s done licking her other hand clean, he pulls her to him for a demanding kiss. He takes her mouth the same way he took her blood and here at least she can respond in kind. She tastes the iron of her own blood on his tongue, feels the danger in his fangs and the promise of damnation in the swollen venom sacs at the roof of his mouth. But when he pulls back, none of that stops her following him. It’s her who follows the fire of the kiss with softer ones to his closed lips and along the line of his jaw down until her head is resting in the crook of his neck.

She hates him. For betraying them all to Garrett. For tricking her into believing he could be better than what he is. For making her want him this much.

His hand kneads at the base of her skull and his head rocks gently against hers. “Skye’s parents. Everything I know about them … they’d never give up their daughter’s name, even if they thought she was dead - _especially_ if they thought she was dead. They took her. Them or someone working for them.”

She sits back on her knees, too tired to expend the effort necessary to deny him when she knows he would be better served by keeping silent. “Where are they?”

He smiles in a way she can’t define at all. His thumb traces her cheek, wiping away tears she didn’t know had fallen. “You looked like a vamp had drunk you dry when you walked in here.” He drops his hand and sits back, shifting his shoulders against the hard wall and letting his eyes slip shut, but he no longer looks like he’s on the verge of decomposition again. “Go. I’ll tell Coulson what I know.”

She’s so shocked by the promise, she’s halfway to her feet before she realizes he’s taken her hand again. His thumb plays with the edges of her charm.

“And, just in case he decides not to listen to what I have to say, you tell him you’re coming back down here tomorrow no matter what.”

Her hand spasms in his but he holds her firm, refusing to grant her an inch.

“If you don’t,” he says slowly, “I’ll call you.”

That cold fear settles in her bones again. A call from a vampire with her blood in his veins will be near impossible to resist, and if the others try to resist for her, hold her back and bar her entry to protect her, she’ll likely go mad.

“You wouldn’t,” she says before common sense catches up with her tongue. The man who aided Garrett in his quest for invincibility isn’t likely to have many compunctions about hurting one person, no matter that they know one another.

That smile returns, but it’s darker now, frightening. “Coulson will believe it. It doesn’t matter if it’s true.”

It does matter, very much, to her. But that thought either hasn’t occurred to him or he simply doesn’t care.

“Go,” he says and there’s just enough force behind the word to have her stumbling into the safety of hallowed ground. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Yes, she thinks as she forces her feet to straighten beneath her. He will. Though why that should make her heart sing, she refuses to examine.

 


End file.
